My Franken – Paying homage to Femme Fatale’s Always Tea Time

Hi everybody! They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Today’s mani was inspired by a new polish from Femme Fatale called Always Tea Time. I have a few Femme Fatale polishes and I really love them all – they are a great brand! But I’m a beginner frankener and wanted to try my hand at making something that looks close to that original.

To “Franken” loosely means to take bits of something, mix them together to get something new. There are two ways you can go about frankening nail polish: You can buy empty bottles, loose pigment and mica, loose glitter, suspension base, etc. OR do like I do and take two or more existing polishes mix them together to make a new polish. I always keep any empty nail polish bottles I have (mostly just topcoat and basecoat bottles) to use for this purpose. Frankening comes in handy if you have a polish that doesn’t look great on your skin tone, add a little something to change it up. I had a white based multi glitter polish bleed so the base was a light pink. I added some light purple to turn the base purple. I never would have worn the light pink based polish, but I love the purple based polish.

So yesterday I took 5 different polishes, mixed them together in an empty OPI bottle I had and adjusted and tweaked until I was happy. I ended up making it a bit darker than I had wanted it (oops!)! So there was such a small amount of glitter left over in the Nina Pro bottle, I just filled that up with the too-dark polish, added some more clear and was very happy with the results! That left me 1/3 of the too dark polish in the OPI bottle, so I added more grey, black and clear and made an additional polish which I am also very happy with! I call my frankens “Paula’s Potions” because I need to have them organized on my spreadsheet. I do give them names also, but I haven’t come up with a good name for this one yet – any ideas??

“Paula’s Potions” franken

Here is the cast of characters in my Franken…

“Paula’s Potions” franken

You can even kind of tell how much of each polish I used by the fill line in the photo. (Except for Sally Hansen Grey Area, I had worn that as a mani before. I just used a few drops of that. And just a few drops of LA Girls 3D Silver). I used the whole bottle of the Nina Pro Boys N Berries.